Gorge Street: where to feast in Fitzrovia

Lifelong Londoners tend to view Leicester Square as the hell mouth: a land of tourists, terrible caricatures and that shrine to cheap chocolate, the M&M megastore. Tottenham Court Road, meanwhile, is the centre of Crossrail chaos. But venture one more stop up the Northern line and you find paradise for the palate.

Being old (30), I remember a time when a trip to Goodge Street meant only one thing gastronomically: a cheap, soak-up-the-booze slice of pizza in ICCO. There was the Michelin-starred Pied à Terre too, of course, but that was beyond my student budget.

Now, though, Goodge Street could be renamed Gorge Street because the dining and drinking culture there has exploded. This month, another two venues will open their doors in the shadow of the BT Tower: Fraq’s Lobster Shack, with a short seafood menu and purse-friendly prices, and the first Delancey & Co, a New York-style deli. They’re joining the likes of Dabbous (so popular it’s impossible to get a table), Barrica Tapas, schnitzel specialists Boopshi’s and Bubbledogs, the restaurant that combines the sublime (champagne) with the suggestive (hotdogs).

“Fitzrovia has long had the high-end restaurants but it’s also a bohemian area for people without two cents to rub together, so there was a big untapped market for more casual dining,” says Shelagh Ryan, the co-founder of Fitzrovia’s Aussie café Lantana. “There has been a mass rejuvenation of the residential side too recently with a huge number of developments. There’s much more of a residents’ population here than in Soho; our customers are as much local residents as workers from local businesses, which means you get people popping in three times a day.” Some of Lantana’s regulars even get their parcels delivered to the restaurant and leave spare keys.

Lantana, on Charlotte Place, has been open for six years but because Fitzrovia is now much busier in the evenings it has just started serving dinner, too. “This used to be much emptier at night time — now it’s a 24-hour place like Soho,” says Ryan. “Because most of the local media and film companies work brutal hours, their staff were often coming in and ordering bacon sarnies in the morning after all-nighters, so we knew there would be demand for dinner.”

Ollie Dabbous, who’s been the capital’s hottest young chef ever since he opened his eponymous restaurant on Whitfield Street in 2012, chose Fitzrovia partly because rents were lower than Soho but also because there was “a good mix of creative businesses that we hoped would embrace what we were doing”. Dabbous opened his second venue, Barnyard, just two streets away. It serves mid-Atlantic comfort food, and there’s no bookings but always a queue.

“Recently there has been a wave of new blood here,” he adds. “This is only for the better. Quite simply, a lazy or tired restaurant won’t survive because there is just too much competition.”

Two years ago, Charlie McVeigh bought the Northumberland Arms, an old pub on the corner of Goodge Street, and he’s converted it into a Draft House, specialising in craft beer. Its foot-long scratchings (pork belly sliced down the middle to resemble giant cheese straws) are a massive hit.

“Before, this was a backwater, one of those slightly forgotten, dowdy corners of London,” McVeigh says. “That’s all changed. In the past year, at least once a month, I get a call from an agent trying to buy the pub for somebody. Everyone’s desperate to get in. It’s like Soho five or 10 years ago.”

He feels he spotted a gap: “The area has a great history of bohemia and of interesting people spending a lot of time in pubs, drinking beer and wine and having interesting conversations. But what we felt about the pub offer in the area is that because it is easy to make money here there are big pub companies with pretty poor venues, whereas we are passionate about doing great beer.”

But although the Draft House serves “gourmet junk food” for lunch (posh hamburgers and hotdogs), dinner has been a victim of Fitzrovia’s success.

“It’s been such an absolute smash that we’ve had to stop doing food in the evenings because it got far too busy,” laughs McVeigh. “We were so full you couldn’t get the dumb waiter to the table as so many people were coming in and out. Now customers have to make do with the scratchings.” If they’re still feeling peckish, though, there’s no shortage of other places they can stumble to.